Quantcast
Channel: screencast – The lost outpost
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 6

OS X mosquitto “bites”…

0
0

In my post last week about the new MQTT support coming to WebSphere MQ I very briefly mentioned that there are some third-party tools that already implement MQTT. One of those I pointed to is the very neat mosquitto broker, a project started by Roger Light.

mosquitto has been around for a while now and is aiming to replicate the functionality of the Really Small Message Broker that is on IBM alphaWorks. One of the neat things about it, from my point of view, is that it there is an Ubuntu PPA repository, so with a couple of apt commands, I can install a running MQTT broker and build my own applications independently (NB there are packages for other Linux distros too, as well as Windows). When I want to do some “heavy lifting” or share data with my ESB, I connect up my local mosquitto broker to pass messages across to WebSphere MQ through the new telemetry channels – because MQTT supports a concept of bridges, and both RSMB and mosquitto both include support for bridging.

I noticed that there wasn’t yet a version available for Mac OS X but figured that it shouldn’t be too difficult to compile and run it on that platform. As it happens, it did turn into a bit of an adventure for a couple of reasons, but at least I learned from the experience. If you’re desperate to build yourself a version to try some MQTT development on the Mac, here’s what I had to do to get it going on Snow Leopard:

  1. Installed mercurial, and a GUI for it called Murky (which requires the hg command line tool from the base mercurial package). The sources for mosquitto are in bitbucket, a Mercurial repository… this is optional of course as I could have just used a source tarball.
  2. Grabbed the latest mosquitto source from bitbucket.
  3. Modified the Makefiles throughout the mosquitto tree to build libraries with a .dylib instead of a .so extension (the default on OS X), and also changed the -soname parameter to -install_name which the OS X version of gcc understands.
  4. At this point the compile was starting to show progress… but failing due to missing symbols… the offender being one from sqlite, _sqlite_enable_load_extension. Turns out that the version of sqlite shipped in OS X 10.6.x is 3.5.4 but it does not have extension loading functionality built in, as evidenced by nm -g /usr/lib/libsqlite3.dylib | grep 'sqlite3_enable'
  5. Downloaded sqlite3.8.0, configured it to install to /usr/local (to avoid overwriting the default OS X shipped version), and built and installed it with no issues.
  6. At this point the compile was pretty smooth, once I modded Makefile link and include lines to point to the new version of sqlite in /usr/local. The only thing that failed was documentation, but that was “optional” 🙂
  7. Trying to start the broker failed… because it was trying to load the sqlite3-pcre extension.
  8. Installed git (the source for the sqlite3-pcre extension is in a git repository).
  9. Grabbed the source for sqlite3-pcre and built and installed it using:
    gcc -shared -o pcre.so -L/usr/local/lib -lsqlite3
              -lpcre -Werror pcre.c -I/usr/local/include
    sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/sqlite3
    sudo cp pcre.so /usr/local/lib/sqlite3
  10. The final issue was that the path to the pcre extension is hard-coded into mosquitto/src/conf.c so I modded that to point at the version in /usr/local and recompiled. I’m assuming that this would not generally be required, but it worked as a hack to get me going!
    D’oh. Just realised that this is precisely what the ext_sqlite_regex variable in the mosquitto.conf file is for. Shouldn’t have bothered!

So that was it. Being fair, if I hadn’t been feeling my way through that, I would have installed git and mercurial, grabbed all the lib sources for sqlite3 and pcre and built them, built mosquitto, and been good to go. At this point, the broker and test clients are runnable (assuming the library paths are set up appropriately):

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib ./mosquitto
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=../lib ./mosquitto_pub -t test/andy
        -m "hello world"

If you are interested in seeing this in action, here’s a short (and silent, but annotated) screencast:

The Java GUI application you see in the screencast is the test client shipped in an old IBM SupportPac, IA92, a Java implementation of MQTT. The final release of the WebSphere MQ Telemetry component for WebSphere MQ will contain something similar, considerably enhanced and integrated into WebSphere MQ Explorer.

In other news, Roger recently announced version 0.8 of mosquitto, which now has slightly different packaging and includes C, C++ and Python clients. I hope to give these a test drive shortly!


Tagged: Coding, development, ia92, Linux, Mac, mac os x, mosquitto, MQTT, OS X, rsmb, screencast, Ubuntu, video, WebSphere

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 6

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images